by Tracy Farr
Rosa had hauled her over the coals, ripped strips off her, ripped her a new one.
‘Change it! Just change it!’
‘I can’t, Mum. He’s Kurt. He is Kurt. It’s his name.’
Sometimes, though, a coldness passes over her, the thought that a name might determine fate. Her rational mind bats the idea away into the dark recesses of her consciousness.
‘He got pissed last night. Kurt. Really pissed. He was passed out, out the back, this morning. In the rain. I saw him. He wasn’t moving. He was just lying there.’
‘Oh, love. But he’s alright, obviously. A bit sorry for himself. He’s a big boy.’ Marti shrugs. ‘You can’t live his life.’
‘I know. I just –’
‘Yeah. Just worry about them, and want to look after them forever. I know.’ Marti gets up, wraps Iris in a hug, smacks a kiss on her cheek. She smells of red wine and smokes and sweat. Her lips are lined red with winestain and old lipstick. ‘You can look after me, lovey. I’m always in need of mothering.’
‘You’re hopeless. But speaking of. Looking after. I – um – went to the hospital last night.’
‘What? Rice! What do you mean? Are you alright?’
‘I’m fine. Fine. I just went to A&E, in town. I had a, sort of, attack, I suppose you’ d call it? At the party. Kind of blacked out. No, more like whited out. But then I was fine. I drove to hospital to get it checked.’
‘You drove? Jesus.’
‘I was fine. It’s just five minutes away. Everyone here was pissed, anyway. It was gallstones, turns out. So strange. I have stones in me.’
‘Is it – what do they do? Do they operate?’
‘Nah. They just keep an eye on them at this stage. I had an ultrasound. It was weird. Baby stones in my belly. Should’ve asked them if they could tell the sex.’
‘You alright now?’
‘Just exhausted. I was up all night. Then Kurt, passed out. The little shit.’
‘Why don’t you go to bed?’
‘Nah. I’m just going to slowly work through the packing. The moving truck and the rubbish skip will be here on Tuesday, then the Good Sammies are coming on Wednesday to pick up whatever’s left. There’s so much to do before then. Hey, Mart?’
‘Yeah?’
‘I haven’t told anyone. About the hospital. I’m fine. No one needs to know.’
‘Oh-kay. Whatever you want.’
‘Except Luce. Luce knows. I told her, before I went. In case anything …’
‘Good. Good. That’s sensible.’ Marti brushes her hair back from her face, shakes her head. ‘I shouldn’t get so pissed. It’s stupid.’ She takes Iris’s hands in hers, across the table. Marti’s hands are cold, her fingers fine. ‘I could’ve been looking after you. Not passed out like a sack of spuds.’
‘Fermented spuds, like vodka. It’s fine. I’m fine.’
‘What’s fine? Is something wrong?’ Kristin walks in, goes to the tap, pours a glass of water.
‘Everything’s fine.’ Iris lifts her index finger to her pursed lips, widens her eyes, mugging silence at Marti. She stands up, puts her hands on her hips. ‘I wish I knew where my phone was, though.’
‘It’ll show up. Right, I’m all coffeed up now. Point me in the direction of some packing, Rice. I am yours to direct.’
‘Brilliant. You finish the kitchen for me? I’m going to get started on the big room, books. Come and help me when you’re done.’
Stitch stones
In her room, between boxes, it takes Iris just a moment to stitch the stones. She mounds them in a cairn, marking the spot. She stitches six stones, one for each of them here, each one of the baby’s mob: Kristin and Paul, Marti and Luce, Kurt and Iris. One on two on three, the stones form a triplet, a triangle, so that every way is up, and everything is stable.
The night-time smell of grown-ups
It’s cold in the big room, and Iris has added layers – a merino cardigan, a woolly hat, fingerless gloves – until she’s warm enough to be comfortable as she packs books into boxes. There are picture books from when Kurt was little, novels with book exchange price stickers on the front cover, histories and magazines, books about the ocean, books about trees. She flicks through a history of their town, of Little Casse Bay and Point Geologue, and the mystery of Édouard Casse, a scientist who sailed on one of the early French ships in the area, who jumped ship and drowned, presumed mad, or drunk, or both. Kurt – aged about ten – was obsessed with the story of the missing geologist. The book falls open at a thick piece of paper. It is a drawing, signed at the bottom of the page, Kurt Diamond. It shows the geologist, Casse, at the bay – their bay – with a hammer in one hand, a sack of rocks in the other, in water up to his waist, holding the rocks up above the water. The geologist has wild eyes, outlined in red. The ship is off in the distance, and there’s a figure on it in a captain’s uniform, making a face at the drowning geologist, blowing a raspberry, pfththt. There’s a ghost geologist, an outline with a gaseous tail in place of legs, floating up from the flesh-and-bones geologist in the water. And his ghost may be heard, that jolly geologist. It’s a cartoon – the kind of cartoon that ten-year-olds draw, she knows that – but it disturbs her. She thinks of Kurt at the beach, in the night, slipping into the water. Like a sack of rocks, sinking like a stone. She puts her hand to her belly. There are stones in me. She slips the drawing back into the book, closes it, puts it in the box of things to keep.
Paul slips his head around the door, leans into the room with his arm pushing against the doorframe, counterbalanced.
‘Ah, there you are. I’m going to make a run, do the recycling and rubbish. Got anything to go?’
‘Just what’s outside the kitchen door. Don’t take any of the empty boxes. And leave all the newspaper, it’s for packing.’
‘Yes boss.’
She watches them move past the doorway like isolated frames in a film: Paul carries a box, clinking with glass; Kurt carries big garbage bags bulging with rubbish; more boxes, more rubbish, more clinking glass. The smell of wine wafts to her, just faintly.
She turns back to the bookshelf, removes another pile of books from the bottom shelf, tall books, pictorials, coffee table books from the fifties, sixties and seventies; the production values getting worse the later the publication date. The earlier books are more like artworks. She remembers some of the early ones from their bookshelves at home. Later ones were Paul’s purchases, celebrating the kitsch of them, then people started giving them to him as jokes – the cheesier the better. The Majestic Swan; The West in Pictures; The Swan River; On the Banks of the Swan; On the Black Swan’s Back; City to Sea; The Golden West; Gorgeous Girls of the Golden West; We’ve Golden Soil.
There’s one, City of Light. The cover shows the shot from space, when the astronaut was overhead and all the lights of the city were turned on. She turns the pages – lights in Hay Street Mall, bad modern lighting along the seafront, at the beach. The Boans storefront, all lit up on Peace Night, 1919. Then in a series of photos, there’s the ship of lights.
Sailing along in the car, towards the ship of lights: she remembers it with such clarity. The old brewery building on the bank of the river – so close it seemed that it was built in the river – had ships patterned from coloured lights strung in place on the river side of the building. There were different ships, perhaps three or four different designs, so part of the wonder of seeing the ship was anticipation: which ship would it be, that night? The sailing ship? The ocean liner? Seen from the back seat of the car – in a state of sleepiness, late at night – as you crossed the bridge, the ships seemed enormous; they were enormous, the size of the building.
She remembers: lying on the back seat of the car, nursing the liberty of that night-time running about, of murder in the dark and fizzy drinks and chips, kids running wild while the grown-ups played cards and tinkled their glasses and smoked their stinky smokes. She remembers: the smell of buffalo grass in the dark, wet and cool from the sprinkler, crisp under their feet.
In the car, there’s the weight of her mother’s coat over her like a heavy dog, calming, almost sedating her. There’s her hand slipping into the pocket of her mother’s coat, nesting there; then, when she pulls her hand out, sniffs the fingers, there’s the smell on her of her mother’s cigarettes.
Iris remembers: worrying her fingers around the hem of the coat, stepping her fingers along its stitches and seams, the feel of the stitches attaching the lining to the hem at the base. There it is: the feel of something sharp inside the lining, and the feel of working her fingers at the hole in the pocket, enlarging the gap that is there – slowly, quietly, working her fingers away at it – until she can reach in to the gap between the coat’s leather and its lining. There’s the piece of paper, the note, that she pulls out, pinching it between the tips of her fingers. She unfolds it, carefully, though it still tears along one fold. It says Dear Rosa. Beautiful Rosa. Something about London, and a bridge.
Iris remembers this: looking up, while she’s reading the note, at her mother – Dear Rosa, Beautiful Rosa – driving, the darkness falling over her face as they drive into shadows, out under bright streetlights, back into shadows, into light again. And she remembers looking across at her father, Frank, his face all in shadow, only partly seen, his eyes – she thinks – closed.
She remembers refolding the note, very carefully, along its old fold lines, very quietly. She remembers thinking she could put the note back where she found it. Or she could keep it. Or she could hide it, poke it down the back of the seat, into that sandy gritty space where no one will ever find it; or post it through the gap where the window’s wound down a little bit (to avoid the car fogging up), and it would float away on the cold wintry night air, into the Swan River, off with the jellyfish and prawns.
She remembers what she did, that night: she remembers tucking the note back into the lining of the coat, and pulling the coat up around her, sitting up on the car’s back seat, looking ahead between her parents. And that’s when she saw it. There’s the ship of coloured lights, sailing on the river. Green and white lights billow its sails, red lights pick out canons along its edge, all reflected in the river below. The building’s invisible behind it. There’s only the sailing ship, the ship of lights on the river, and Iris watching it, its lights reflecting colour – green, blue and red – onto her parents’ faces, making them strange.
Then: her head’s back down on the long back seat of the car once the ship’s out of view, and she’s rocked back to sleep by the car sailing, bumping, rough and smooth over bitumen, all the way home. She remembers waking up – that night, and other nights – to the slow glide, the turn with the flicker’s tick tick tick into the driveway, her mother opening the car door and leaning in over her, the burnt, papery smell of cigarettes, and the smell of her mother’s stiff going-out hair. There is Rosa bundling Iris up, carrying her inside. There is Iris, resting her cheek on the satiny bulge of her mother’s bosom. There is Rosa carrying her into her bedroom, leaning down to drop her into her bed with her clothes still on. Iris smells it now, the smell of Rosa to send her to sleep: smoke and gin and perfume and sweat and hairspray, the night-time smell of grown-ups.
Stitch a ship
She uses green thread for the lights on the brewery, reflecting in the river’s water, late in childhood nights. Two masts, sails billowing, pennants flying from the tips of the masts. Little tails of thread, left loose, mark telltales on the sails, to show the flow of wind. This ship sails into the wind, close-hauled, bow lifting up and on, ploughing through imagined waves. It’s the brewery ship, and it’s Casse’s ship, too, poor man, jumping and diving and disappearing, sinking to the bottom (sinking like kittens in a stone-weighted sack), sleeping with the fishes. She threads brown-paper-coloured thread, and stitches a sack, flying off the back of the ship towards the unstitched water.
A song to sing for the baby
Luce is on the bed, with her laptop open on her knees. She’s humming at the screen, watching the audio levels bounce in the input monitor, humming just loud enough to register, not loud enough for anyone in the house to hear her (she thinks, anyway). Usually, the way she likes to work on songs is by building them, bit by bit, starting with a melody, then layering words onto that. She won’t build layers of sound for this, though. This one needs to be simple. Just a song to sing for the baby.
‘I’ll write the song. There should be a song.’
That’s what she’ d said to Kristin and Iris yesterday. Iris was holding the baby, then, and its little hands were reaching out, and the idea just came to her, that that’s what she wanted to do. Write a song. And now, with the phone thing, it feels even more important. If Rosa’s – gone – then naming the baby will cheer everyone up. People talk about life going on, right? That’ll be what naming the baby is like. And she can write a song – to celebrate – and sing the song, a gift to the baby. Like, I believe that children are our future. That song. But for the baby. Because the baby feels like their baby. All of their baby. Which is weird, and untrue. But that’s what it feels like. And it can be for Rosa, too.
She wants the melody to be pretty, and simple. Like a nursery rhyme. Or maybe more like a hymn, or a folk song. Folk songs are like telling stories, like the faery tales in Rosa’s book. There isn’t a story for this song, though. The baby doesn’t have a story yet. It’s just got them. All of them, and all of their stories. She’ d thought about laying down a melody using the keyboard function – sort of laborious, but it works if you’re not doing anything too complex – then making words to go with it. But she’s decided that the words and the music need to happen at the same time.
So, without thinking too much, she lets words come out of her mouth, and the music finds its way out, too. There’s a magic of songs, that they can happen that way. She’ll write the words as she sings. She selects Record on the screen, and the triangle goes green. She’ll sing quietly, so the others can’t hear her for now. She moves closer to the laptop so the mic will pick up her voice. The two green lines of the levels bump and bounce as she sings, softly, at the screen in front of her.
It starts as a nonsense of words, but some phrases stick – they feel sweet, and right, in her mouth – and the music forms around them. Then, at some point, the music takes over for a bit, bringing up words to match it. She sings the first line over again, shifts the end until it’s right. She failed music at school, because the notes on the page don’t make any sense to her; they’re like an army of ants swarming up and over a farm fence. This is what she does, though: plays and makes it all by ear. This is how it all makes sense.
She’ll listen back to the recordings, then write the words down later. It’ll probably read like shit written down, but it sounds okay in a song, as if the music changes the meaning, lifts it up and away from the words.
‘Do you have any paper?’ Luce asks Iris. Iris is sitting on the floor in the big room, packing books into boxes. She’s surrounded by stuff.
‘For writing, you mean? Or drawing?’
‘Anything. Writing. For the song. The baby’s song.’
‘In my bag. In the bedroom. There’s a notebook. You can rip pages from the back of that.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Or ask Kurt. Or – hold on, I think there’s –’
She moves over towards a shelf, takes a plastic basket from it; from the plastic basket, takes a pad of paper, A4, filled with thick coloured pages. There’s a clown with a balloon on the front cover of the pad. From the side, the paper looks like layers in rock, or an ice-cream cake. The basket is filled with felt pens, bits of crayons, coloured pencils.
‘Take it all, love,’ Iris hands her the pad, and then the whole basket. Luce takes it, turns to go, and Iris says, in that tone, ‘You’re welcome.’
‘Oh. Ah, thanks.’
‘So, how’s it going? The song?’
‘Meh,’ Luce shrugs, ‘okay.’
She shrugs again – what’s she supposed to say? What does Iris want to know? She’ll hear
it when it’s ready – then turns, takes the basket and the pad back to her room, closes the door behind her.
Luce lies on the bed, headphones off, writing the words onto paper so she can walk around with them in her hand, learn them, maybe make them better. She’s writing with a green felt pen onto orange paper. She’s written a heading in purple, THE BABY’S SONG, at the top of the page. She hears footsteps in the hallway outside the bedroom, voices, her mother and Iris. Her hand curls over the page, without her thinking about it. Their voices get fainter, and she hears mugs clatter in the kitchen. Again.
She flicks through the rest of the pad, looking for more orange paper. Halfway through the pad, the drawings start. They are only on a few pages – she flicks through – maybe only on five or six sheets. Only one of them has a name on it: KURT, in the big, uneven letters of a little kid, kindy age, just learning to write their name. The R is back to front, and the letters don’t line up, they trail up the page, as if they’re climbing it. They’re not the classic little kid drawings that she remembers doing herself; these are buildings in miniature, and in section, like a building with the side removed – like a doll’s house – so you can see inside. There are tiny figures in the rooms of the buildings, and stairs and slides and ramps and spirals, all with tiny people and vehicles. There are animal shapes, too, and guns and tanks, dinosaurs and birds flying overhead, all of them tiny. At the bottom of the page there’s a wavy line to indicate water and, under it, fish shapes, and something bigger off to the side of the page – as if it’s lurking there, offstage, out of sight – the head of a big fish or monster, just the face (do fish have faces?), with a grinning mouth and whiskers, the grinning mouth somehow threatening. As if it will eat everything else on the page. Some of the little tiny people are falling off the building, and into the water. It’s almost as if the monster figure is licking its lips in anticipation.
